Power Surge
by Falruza Black
Summary: Forced to keep up with the city's crime in order to clean it up as the black-outs begin happening more often, the mutant ninja team must find the source soon, or die from exhaustion and lose the city in the process. New villains, new twists!


**POWER SURGE**

**Chapter 1 - "Blackout Number 5"**

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Five hours into the black out, the city crime spree had escalated to well-over what the forces could handle.

The darkness made even the weakest braver.

"What's this now - our fifth power-out in the last two weeks?" Donatello crossed the gap between two rooftops with a strong jump, leading his brothers on the hunt.

"Yeah." Raphael passed him up, leaping over a skylight.

The brothers veered around a storage shed, heading for the next set of dark alleys.

"They've been lasting longer and longer too..." Leonardo said as he caught up to Michelangelo and dove off a roof with him, both landing gracefully on a fire escape ladder on the side of the opposite building.

Don and Raph were already in the alley below, taking out two thugs who had been in the process of robbing a small market.

A woman's scream was heard in the distance like an echoing train whistle over a canyon.

"I'm on it!" Michelangelo yelled as he pulled away from the fight heading back up to the roof, just as Leonardo touched ground to assist the other two.

"Signal us and we'll be right behind you!" Leonardo hollered up to him as he broke the thug's nose with one hard knee to his face.

The thug groaned helplessly, clutching his profusely bleeding face, as Michelangelo continued the hunt from above, heading toward the scream's origin.

Another few seconds of well-placed kicks and punches and the thugs were disposed of and tied up in a way no man could get out of without extreme, self-mutilating measures.

And onward the mutant turtles went like the wind.

"Ahoooo!" came the owl-like, haunting, familiar voice of their brother from many streets away. The signal!

"Right!" Donatello yelled in a harsh whisper to his brothers behind him as he leapt rooftops again, making a sharp right turn, leading them toward Mikey.

In under a minute appeared three shadowy, muscled shapes raining down from the sky, landing with precision beside Michelangelo and the woman he was presently defending from three street villains. His brothers had arrived.

Wasting no time, their weapons already in hand and ready before they touched ground, the brothers began fending off the attackers with a flurry of motions executed so smoothly, it was like watching a ghostly dance.

"I knew all that DDR had to be good for something, eh Mikey?" Raphael threw Michelangelo a smug look.

"Yeah, right." Mikey gave Raph a sarcastic glare knowing that despite the joke, Raph was right. He couldn't have kept up tonight if he hadn't been going like a mad dog on that game for the past few months. Raph _would_ like that - a video game of his that actually _helped_ them all. It was humorous to him that all of the brothers were doing a whole hell of a lot better having played that game too for almost as long as he did. Even Splinter. Well...it was all in the _way_ they played it too. He chuckled to himself.

The woman behind him fainted and he spun around hearing the soft exhaling sound he was quite used to.

Checking to make sure she was still breathing, he waiting another moment while his brothers finished cleaning up the mess, before he patted her face to wake her.

Her eyes opened to find herself on a rooftop, confused and alone, but safe.

***

Into the night, the crime sweep-up continued until the brothers were too exhausted to do anything else but head home. A sliver of dawn light shone on the horizon by the time they reached the underground sewer tunnels.

Stumbling like a hungry hoard of zombies through the lair door, they made their way to the couch and collapsed.

Splinter was still up as well, though he had enough energy to tend to them, handing them each a small cup of hot green tea and an energy pill. The orange and oddly-shaped pills were of a special mix that Don had made for them for these power-out trips. They were mostly made of calcium, B vitamins, potassium, sodium, magnesium, beta carotene, and peanut butter.

Walking back to Don's computer, his own mug of tea in hand, Splinter sat back down in front of the screen.

Though his sons were barely alert, he gave them a report in a husky sleep-depraved voice, "Thanks to your new tracking system, Donatello, I was able to navigate myself through it and locate the source of this night's black out." His finger touched the screen at the spot that was blinking.

"Another source, another day." Raphael mumbled somewhat incoherently, his head draped like the famous Dali clocks over the back of the couch.

"So we'll hit it up tomorrow and check it out." Donatello breathed out the words half asleep with his eyes closed.

"Yeah...and it'll be a dead end like the last one." Raph added in a drone tone.

"Yeah...and maybe it won't." Leonardo pulled himself upright and then flopped forward, arms supporting him on his thighs, his head hanging down.

Loud snoring could be heard coming from the pile on the floor that was Mikey.

"Get some sleep now, my sons." Splinter watched them all rise without another word and head for their rooms, dragging their feet slowly as they did so.

Turning his head back to the screen, the sound of Mikey snoring his only companion, he went back to clicking the keys, following a lead and a hunch.

***

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**NEXT UP - "Out Sourcing"**


End file.
